Originally, operator services were provided by manually plugging cords in and out of cord boards to establish connections. As telephone traffic increased the number of cord boards and operators increased correspondingly. Then with the institution of direct distance dialing in this country, most calls could be dialed directly without any operator intervention. However, even today a substantial number of calls still require operator assistance. Normally these calls are instituted from coin stations or concern special billing categories such as person-to-person, collect, bill-to-third party, or credit card calls.
During the last 20 years several major efforts have been made to automate the operator assistance function as much as possible consistent with quality service and economic realities. One such system is called the Traffic Service Position System No. 1 (TSPS No. 1) which is described in R. J. Jaeger, Jr. - A. E. Joel, Jr. U.S. Pat. No. 3,484,560, issued Dec. 16, 1969. This system has been widely implemented and has been very effective in providing operator service in the larger cities. However, it has not been economically feasible to utilize such a large system in smaller communities.
To extend the TSPS concept to smaller communities, remote equipment (called the RTA) has been designed to function with the TSPS No. 1 to provide such service to customers geographically associated with the remote equipment. This concept also appears to be successful and in the future medium size cities will be afforded TSPS service.
However, even with the RTA as conceptually described in A. E. Joel, Jr. U.S. Pat. No. 3,731,000, it is anticipated that TSPS service will still not be provided to the small local offices or community dial offices with low levels of operator assistance traffic.
Moreover, in each of the prior art TSPS systems, operator assistance calls destined for the originating office (i.e., the calling and called stations are served by the same office) have to be completed via the associated toll office and then routed back to the originating office. Thus, a relatively simple "local" call ties up expensive toll office as well as the TSPS equipment.
It is an object of this invention to facilitate the routing of operator assistance calls back to their originating offices without the use of any facilities in the toll office.
It is a further object of this invention to economically provide basic TSPS services to very small local offices and community dial offices (CDOs) with low levels of operator assistance traffic.
It is a still further object of this invention to reduce the number of trunks to the toll office and at the same time to provide for more efficient trunk utilization.